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I can't wait! Glad I held on to my DX. If you have to wait I found a site that has the Ice Cream Sandwich wallpapers. It is formatted for mobile so installing them is easy. It also has a ton of other good wallpapers as well. www.freedroidwallpaper.comReply

Is it just me or is the People section with twitter integration and swiping left for all the info and the metro style browser and people area seem awfully identical to Windows Phone 7. Sounds like a lot of people taking from Microsoft then calling them insignificant.Reply

This is true. The Roboto font looks a lot like Metro's stock, and many of the designs make you think of Metro all around. Lately, Microsoft doesn't get too much love for innovating. It's the only UI that looks different yet it is hardly mentioned. Quite unfair.

Another example, the latest Android market app, might even be stealing the hubs concept from Metro.Reply

I even noticed the douche that is in control of Android design make fun of metro style like Windows phone as junk and childish. He even mentions that metro detracts from the information the user needs. Yet they use it for theirs. Plus metro is made to focus only on the information at hand to get in, do what you need, and get out, fast.

When is everyone going to see that Apple and Google is no different than Microsoft was 8 yrs ago. They just are in it for the money and don't care about anything else. Yet people love Apple and Google like it is the spoken word of God when they come out with something (Apple more so).

I'm guessing it is the same for all US versions as my AT&T GS2 has the NFC built into the battery. The AT&T sales reps didn't even know about it. I was wondering what would be the use of it other than making purchases. Reply

While I like having physical buttons, the problem with Android has been the complete lack of consistency even within the same manufacturer with phones have different number of buttons and different orders making changing between phones frustrating as you get used to a certain order and number of buttons. The N900 has no physical buttons and a consistent interface where all applications have the same pop up close, back, multi-task and menu buttons which works fine.

As mentioned in the Keynote event, the on-screen buttons will be disappeared in some situations. For instance, while watching video or browsing photos. In such way, users could take full advantage of the 720p screen.

If not more, it will probably be hard to get real comparisons with previous versions done, seeing how only two of the Android phones are going to get 4.0 (for the time being, at least) and most models are not going to run both. Reply

I watched the keynote announcement live on Youtube last night, and despite a few technical problems with the demo there was a lot to get excited for.

Google seems to have really hit its stride with ICS - it's quite a departure from iOS in the look and feel department. They seem to have taken bits and pieces of ideas from WebOS and even Windows Mobile 7 with their multitask switcher (and flick to kill and app gesture) and larger picture tiles for users in contacts, respectively.

Now we need to wait for the official launch date and figure our if and when it's coming to older phones. There have been rumblings posted that Google is not happy with the fragmented nature of Android on smartphones; here's hoping that Android 4.0 ICS is available on phones from at least the last year or two!Reply

One more quick note from the presentation is that they mentioned that the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is 1280x720 and that 720p is the "default" resolution for Android 4.0 ICS. Here's hoping that it's still scalable back to the resolution that 99.5% of current Android smartphones run. They announced that it will be coming out in November, so I hope there's more updates on ICS' availability soon.Reply

So I have been thinking about this for a while. There's no doubt that Honeycomb's initial release was a buggy mess, and there's something to be said for basic growing pains, but something stood out in the TIMN interview with Matias Duarte: “Honeycomb was like: we need to get tablet support out there. [sic] So that was the mission, and it was a time-boxed mission. Any corner we could cut to get that thing out the door, we had to.”The iPad was introduced in May of 2010. The Xoom was introduced in January of 2011 (weird to think it's so young). We generally say that a product of this type takes 12-18 months, start to finish. That pegs Honeycomb's nascency as early as 2009, around when the Motorola Droid was first making its introduction. Something else happened in May of 2010, though. Matias left Palm and joined the Android team. And from this quote it sounds like he was there from the projects infancy.I don't imagine that Google didn't have some tablet strategy in mind before the iPad was introduced, but I don't think they were prepared for the consumer fervor that accompanied the iPad, and that's why they brought Matias on board and why Honeycomb was a rushed iteration.We're obviously very excited about ICS, as to your question about scaling up and down, Google has been aiming for resolution independence for sometime, and it's really up to the developers to build their apps with this in mind. The hope is that the framework and tools that Google is implementing with ICS helps make this an easy thing for devs to do.As for ICS showing up on older hardware? Three things need to happen, first it needs to be ported to multiple chipsets, an easier thing to do when the code is open sourced. Second, the xda-developer community has to take on the challenge of doing it themselves, a lot of hardware from the past 18 months won't make the cut. Third, demand on hardware that just missed the chance (SGSII for instance) needs to be high, and that means we can't all stick our hands in our pockets and wait to upgrade till an ICS phone we like hits the market.Thanks for the comment, sorry for the wall of text reply.

While Google has certainly drawn some inspiration from both Microsoft and Apple with ICS, you are clearly misinformed on the examples you've provided.

1) The ability to swipe away notifications has existed in custom Android ROMs for ages now, if anything they've taken this from the ever active Android community.

2) Viewing notifications from the lockscreen has also been around in custom Android ROMs for quite some time as well. In fact, I was able to do this on my T-Mobile G1 before that had yet been out a year. It is certainly possible that implementations of this existed prior to that, but it certainly isn't a WP7 innovation.

3) The 'Action Bar' has been an Android UI Pattern since before WP7 ever met the public eye. Before Honeycomb there wasn't an API for it and it wasn't built into the SDK, nonetheless it was a pattern Google urged developers to begin implementing themselves. There is actually a Google I/O 2010 workshop video on YouTube about this.

4) Contacts on Android have had social networking updates integrated for years now. The 'People' app is nothing more than a redesign of this. I won't argue that it isn't heavily influenced by WP7, but the feature is hardly something new or even remotely unique to WP7.

Again, Google has certainly copied some features from Apple and Microsoft. At the same time, each has certainly copied some features from Google. It would hardly be rational to argue otherwise. Despite this, what was shown yesterday for ICS is in no way a copy of the WP7 user experience. Portions of the presentation are similar at best, but the UI concepts are completely different.

There is certainly room to improve consistency within the OS, but from the looks of things this is a massive step forward from Gingerbread, which was in turn a massive step forward from Froyo. It will only get better, as it should. This will only serve to drive improvements in the other OS's as well.Reply

"What we haven’t seen is the ability to peek at notifications from the lock screen and then go directly into the app that originated the notification upon unlock."

My Samsung Exhibit 4g has missed call and text notifications built into the lock screen and it is as easy as sliding a puzzle piece to unlock the phone directly into that app. So again nothing new here. Maybe just a better implementation of it. Reply

As someone who doesn't use internet functionality, and has internet disabled on my Nexus S, should any of Ice Cream Sandwich's features matter to me? Honest question here. Minus anything internet-related, what should I be impressed by with ICS?Reply

So, I'm having trouble figuring out exactly how to answer you. I'm going to assume that you mean that you don't have 3g enabled on your phone, but still access a WiFi network with it. If that's the case then there's still obviously lots to look forward to since all of these optimizations will work just fine over WiFi as over a mobile data connection.If, however, you really don't have any internet connectivity on your phone whatsoever, then you'll appreciate the UI elements of the call and messaging services, and though you'll have to manually enter them you'll enjoy the People app and it's contact organization and features. But if that really is the case, the more pressing question is, what the heck are you doing wasting your money on a smartphone when you don't use it to browse the web, play apps, send and receive e-mails, interact with social media, view videos and listen to music and generally do any of the things that one buys a smartphone for?And that's a serious question.

I own the phone. Bought it straight. No calling plan, no service providers. I use "calling cards", but that works a bit differently here in Norway, than in the US. I use my Nexus S for pictures, music, texting, and as a plain old cell phone. I haven't found any use for the internet services, though I did use the GPS function once.

I'm not big on social networks like Facebook. Of course I have accounts, but use them just a few times a year. Not sure I'd want to watch video on a tiny screen. Or play games on it for that matter.Reply

Well, let me go ahead and suggest that you consider it, if for no other reason than the joys of having your contacts completely portable. When you register your phone with Google and activate their syncing services they upload your contacts and store them for you, updating them as you update them. So if a friend changes his number it's changed in the cloud and also in your Gmail (if you use it).Further, if you are a Gmail user, this is the best mobile Gmail experience available.Basically, these devices are built around connectivity, and that will become more true as things continue. The voice to text functions for instance are all done on the server side, so without access to the internet you wouldn't have access to that. The contacts pictures and data are populated automatically. You could enter it all yourself but that would be tedious. If you're looking for a pure calling and texting phone, I'm surprised that you're not supporting the (near) home team and carrying one of the excellent Nokia phones from the last few years. Either way, thanks for the reply.

Google hired Matias Duarte away from Palm WebOS. He was their UI designer. Honeycomb implemented some of his ideas, but , ICS is the first full OS release with him at the helm. MS is copying his work from Palm WebOS if anything.

I am super excited to get a Galaxy Nexus with ICS when it's released.Reply

i always thought this should be baked into the OS. even though we have unlimited usage, i've never been able to figure out why my wife's nearly doubles mine (nearing 1gb each billing cycle). whatever's sucking data is probably sucking battery and i can finally tell her to get rid of the culprit!Reply